Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street”

Opinions about Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” will be—how can I put it gently?—volatile. The movie is based on a memoir of the same title, by the Wall Street scoundrel Jordan Belfort, who cheated his clients out of tens of millions of dollars, ratted on his friends, and was indicted and jailed for securities fraud and money-laundering. Set in the period from the mid-eighties to the aughts, it’s a three-hour-long satire of loathsome financial activity and extravagant debauchery, and it’s meant to epitomize everything that has gone wrong with money culture. Scorsese employs a flexible narrative form and a free-swinging style of filming. (Rodrigo Prieto is the cinematographer.) The camera plunges into groups of stockbrokers, cleaving their numbers as Moses did the Red Sea; it swings over them and then swings back, like some video-enhanced boomerang. “Wolf” has great, giddy moments, and Terence Winter (“Boardwalk Empire”), who did the adaptation, creates flurries of raucously cynical dialogue that hit you like a rapid series of jabs. Leonardo DiCaprio puts his voice, his body, and his handsome face, which he contorts into a grimace, into what is certainly his largest performance yet. But the entire movie feels manic and forced, as though Scorsese is straining to make the craziest, most over-the-top picture ever—as if he is determined, at seventy-one, to outdo his earlier triumphs, “Raging Bull” and “GoodFellas,” and to show that he’s still the king. Put crudely, this is his attempt to out-Tarantino Tarantino.

I didn’t much care for “Wolf,” but every time I describe it to someone he says, “I want to see that!” Many people are going to be made happy by the wild, hyper-vulgar exuberance, the endless cruddy behavior (swindling, drugs, whoring, orgies, dwarf-tossing, more swindling), and the fully staged excess of every kind. To adopt the idiom and the tone of the movie: Are you fucking kidding me? Are you telling me that you’re bored by big money? By orgies? By monster yachts? Are you saying you don’t like looking at beautiful naked blondes? Is that what you’re fucking telling me? Three hours of that kind of hectoring. The film, as you can see, is a bit of a trap for critics. Scorsese mounts the filthy, piggish behavior on such a grand scale that mere moral disapproval might seem squeamish, unimaginative, frightened. Most of us, after all, wouldn’t dare screw up as badly as Jordan Belfort. The movie has a bullying tone, and you have to come back at it. All right, then: I myself am not squeamish, and I’ve done my own share of screwing up financially, and yet I found plenty of room in my heart for disgust, and even for boredom. “Wolf” is delivered, almost all the way through, at the same pitch of extreme aggression. It’s relentless, deafening, deadening, and, finally, unilluminating.

As the critic Farran Smith Nehme pointed out to me, one of the filmmakers’ mistakes was to take Jordan Belfort’s claims at face value. In his memoir, Belfort presents himself as a very big deal on Wall Street. The movie presents him the same way—as a thieving Wall Street revolutionary—whereas, in fact, he was successful but relatively small time. From the beginning, “Wolf” feels inflated, self-important. DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort comes right at us, narrating directly to the camera, like a low-rent Richard III. He takes us into his confidence, pitching his life story to us—we might be one of his clients. As he talks, “Wolf” develops the rise-and-fall shape of a gangster movie, like Scorsese’s marvellous “GoodFellas,” which, too, is narrated by its hero, played by Ray Liotta. But we never develop any empathy for Jordan, nor do we identify with him, as we did with Liotta’s Henry Hill. The narration has such an unremittingly boastful tone that the response is, often, “What a jerk.”

Jordan’s story is an up-from-nowhere tale. He gets into a Wall Street firm in the eighties, passes his Series 7 exam, and becomes a broker, only to run into the crash of October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average drops by twenty-three per cent in a single day. He gets thrown out of work, and winds up in a boiler room in a Long Island shopping center, where demoralized schlubs pitch ridiculous penny stocks to easily excited clients—garbage men appear to be especially gullible. Jordan, who particularly excels at pump-and-dump schemes, takes over the place soon enough, and, in company with Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill), a former furniture salesman, he starts his own company on Wall Street: Stratton Oakmont, an actual company, which did actual stock-brokering and committed various treacheries. (The company no longer exists.)

At this point, the movie lurches wildly into excess. Again and again, as Jordan stands in front of his legion of brokers, mic in hand, DiCaprio arches his back and winds himself up as if he’s about to fling a shot put; he drops his voice, nearly swallows the mic, then shouts like James Brown at the Apollo. He preaches the gospel of winning, killing, triumphing. Scorsese gives him three long motivational speeches, each one working up to a hysterical high. As performance, they’re amazing if you prize brazen overacting. But what is the point of Jordan saying the same thing three times? By the end of the first speech, my teeth ached. Marty, we get it: Gordon Gekko was wrong. Greed—the surprise here is overwhelming—is bad: intoxicating, corrupting, destroying. On the trading floor, the brokers flip the bird at clients as they talk to them on the phone. We’re invited to enjoy how contemptuous they are of anyone whom they can bully, cozen, or blarney out of money. Listening to Jordan’s speeches, these brokers (women as well as men) go nuts, cheering and pumping their fists like a crowd at a Fascist rally. They come off as fools, manipulators who, it turns out, are very easily manipulated themselves, working their butts off to make Jordan rich. The speeches, and the responses to them, leave you with a queasy feeling; you can hardly react the way the brokers do. Instead, you can only shrink down in your seat, battered.

The first speech is capped by a trading-floor orgy, in which a naked male marching band parades its way onto the floor, followed by a procession of naked hookers. The girls wrestle out-of-shape brokers to the floor or straddle them on desks. It sure is whoopee time. (When money is around, we’re meant to think, everyone gets laid.) There are additional orgies later, staged with such demented physical vigor that they might be part of a Broadway musical. At times, Scorsese seems to be directing a knock-the-tourists-dead show called “Greed!” Hundred-dollar bills, which Jordan peels from an oversize roll, flutter through the air like snowflakes. Quaaludes, ingested in bulk, slow Jordan and Donnie down until they fall into a drooling, paralyzed trance. Naked blondes keep showing up. The point, of course, is that the men who sling them around are pigs, but Scorsese doesn’t get anything out of the actresses. They’re just bodies, and he’s using them, too. Everything is pushed to the edge of mania and disintegration.

Satire presented this broadly ceases to have any instructive or cleansing effect. It becomes burlesque—lewd, vaunting, and self-promoting—and you can get excited by it and feel slightly soiled at the same time. It’s not only the trading-floor and debauchery scenes that are directed in this overwrought way; Jordan and Donnie and their cronies in the Stratton Oakmont inner circle gather together and pelt every subject that comes up with profanity, some of it funny, some of it just repetitive and show-off raw. Scene after scene explodes into an obscene fight or an obscene mock-fight, staged with all of Scorsese’s stunning energy and pounding-temples anxiety. There are so many noisy moments like this that the movie has no possible climax—or it has so many climaxes that it seems like one almost continuous fit. Hysteria is not a very productive dramatic mode.

The few times that Scorsese releases his choke hold on the audience, he produces some fine moments, and at least two classic set pieces. At Jordan’s first brokerage job, Matthew McConaughey, playing the top broker, Mark Hanna, explains the facts of life: Never work for the client, always work for yourself. Don’t let the client cash in his winnings, argue him into reinvesting, and take the commission. McConaughey, who has been on a roll of his own in recent years, speeds up his Texas drawl, which somehow makes the sleazy advice even more potent. As McConaughey instructs, holding up a little vial of cocaine and caressing the air, DiCaprio listens closely, and you can actually see Jordan learning. At that instant, he comes across as extremely intelligent, even appealing. Afterward, he’s hardly an imaginable, or a bearable, human being.

The second great scene: a long, serious confrontation between Jordan and a straight-arrow F.B.I. agent, Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler, from “Friday Night Lights”), who is Jordan’s Inspector Javert, pursuing him for years. They meet on Jordan’s hundred-and-seventy-foot yacht in New York harbor. A sober fellow, Patrick is meant to represent not just the law but also moral sanity and decency. Jordan, who buys everything and everyone, sees in Patrick a guy who rides the subway—a loser—and he makes the mistake of underestimating him. Scorsese creates Patrick as fully equal to Jordan in guile and determination, and Kyle Chandler, a formidable actor, puts layers of amusement and contempt into his work. As the two men talk, grinning and putting each other on, wrapping insults in suave flattery, the scene develops what the rest of the movie doesn’t have: undertones. Scorsese has always understood the way that men try to outmaneuver and dominate each other.

If there were more moments like that, the movie might have been as fine as “GoodFellas.” But, in general, Scorsese wears his performers out with noisy, redundant material. Casting off his helpful first wife (Cristin Milioti), Jordan acquires as wife No. 2 a slender blonde, Naomi (Margot Robbie), just as he acquires an enormous house on Long Island’s Gold Coast, and the yacht. The marital fights are depressingly banal; we’ve seen these screaming, violent conflicts in many movies before, including a few by Scorsese. Does he think can make them fresh by turning up the volume? The pouting Margot Robbie tries hard, but she’s no match for Jennifer Lawrence, who has a similar role in “American Hustle,” as well as a much better script. As Donnie, Jonah Hill, grinning with shiny new choppers, is amusing at first, but he is forced to overdraw on what he can do. The performance doesn’t grow, it just repeats.

DiCaprio, who keeps selling rather than acting his character, is the ultimate victim of Scorsese’s over-driven vitalism. You feel like you’re being back-thumped into admiring his version of Jordan’s self-presentation. In all, he gives one of the most completely externalized performances in the history of the movies. Everything is big, and he turns himself inside out physically. Writhing and then crawling on the floor in a quaalude overdose, he rivals Lon Chaney in his contortions. (The physical excess, in its stupid way, is meant to be heroic, though no one could punish his body as much as Jordan Belfort does and continue to look like Leonardo DiCaprio.) DiCaprio has enormous physical range, but the performance is spiritually constrained. Jordan lacks complexity, contradiction, insight. No doubt there are terrible people on Wall Street, but it’s naïve to put a man this limited at the center of a three-hour-long epic. Illumination never arrives.

“The Wolf of Wall Street” is a fake. It’s meant to be an exposé of disgusting, immoral, corrupt, obscene behavior, but it’s made in such an exultant style that it becomes an example of disgusting, obscene filmmaking. It’s actually a little monotonous; spectacular, and energetic beyond belief, but monotonous in the way that all burlesques become monotonous after a while.

David Denby has been a staff writer and film critic at The New Yorker since 1998.